A large number of essays, lectures and interviews in which Vargas Llosa explores his understanding of literature bear witness to his continuous interest in the theoretical aspects of literary creation. To name just a few landmark texts: in 1966 he delivered the programmatic lecture La novela [The Novel], an exposition of his ideas about novel writing; a year later he declared that 1literature is fire’, elaborating on the rebellious nature of fiction in his famous Rómulo Gallegos Prize speech; the critical study of García Márquez. Historia de un deicidio [History of a Deicide], published in 1971, begins with a definition of Vargas Llosa's own understanding of fiction; Historia secreta de una novela [Secret History of a Novel], also from 1971, tells the story of how he wrote La casa verde [The Green House]; and 1972 saw the publication of a book-length interview conducted by Ricardo Cano Gaviria called El buitre y el Ave Fénix [The Vulture and the Phoenix], which touched on all important aspects of Vargas Llosa's literary theory. Later essays such as ‘El arte de mentir’ [The Art of Lying] and the prefaces to his plays of the 1980s examined the ambiguities between truth and lies, such as the appropriately named ‘Las mentiras verdaderas’ [Lies That Tell the Truth], introduction to La señorita de Tacna [The Young Lady from Tacna] (1981). He returned to this notion in 1990, in a preface to the collection of his literary criticism called La verdad de las mentiras [The Truth of Lies].